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Local Government Finance

In all honesty, I cannot give the hon. Gentleman the sort of guarantee or assurance that he seeks. Surely he accepts that, first, we need to improve the analysis and data that we have on population and migration movements. Our population is changing rapidly and becoming more mobile, and our sources of data struggle to keep up with that. We use the best and the latest that we have, but we clearly need to improve. Making a case for saying that the nature of a specific population imposes additional costs on particular public services and that that needs to be recognised in the distribution of funding support from central Government is a step beyond the data step. The decisions that I have been taking as part of the current settlement follow. If we can find better data and formulae, how and whether they are used becomes a question of policy.